Shrink Rap

by Robert B. Parker

  “Why wouldn’t he?” I said.

  “He wouldn’t do that,” Kim said.

  Her eyes were beginning to tear up.

  “To whom?” I said.

  Kim’s eyes were wet, and her lower lip trembled.

  “He wouldn’t do that to me,” Kim said.

  “He wouldn’t have sex with you?” I said.

  “He wouldn’t with anyone else,” she said fiercely.

  “But you?”

  “We were special,” she said. Her ferocity was building.

  “So you and he were intimate,” I said.

  She started to speak and stopped. She looked at me as if I were treacherous. Which, actually, I guess I was, a little.

  “We were not,” she said.

  I nodded. We walked in silence for a short while. The Akita snuffling eagerly along among the wet leaves, the rain beading on his thick coat.

  “Did Dr. Melvin ever give you any medication?” I said.

  “Medication?”

  “Yes. Maybe to calm your nerves? Help you relax?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Why of course not?” I said. “Lots of psychiatrists prescribe medication for patients.”

  “Well, John didn’t.”

  “You called him John?” I said.

  She stared at me without saying anything. The Akita seemed to feel something going on between us. He stopped and leaned against Kim’s leg gently, and looked at me.

  “I don’t wish to talk with you any further,” Kim said.

  “Kim, if Melvin is exploiting you, and exploiting other women, he is doing just the opposite of what he’s supposed to be doing. He’s harming you.”

  “I want you to leave me alone,” Kim said.

  “Kim,” I said. “We both know that you and he…”

  She held up her hand. “Sam is trained,” she said. “If you don’t leave me alone I’ll tell him to attack.”

  I had a gun. But I didn’t want to shoot the dog. I kind of wanted to shoot Kim, but it would be hard to explain to the cops.

  But Officer, she wouldn’t answer my questions.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll leave you alone. But please, for your own good, see another psychiatrist.”

  “Go away,” Kim said.

  “There’s a doctor named Max Copeland. See him.”

  Kim shook her head. The Akita had stiffened a little. His ears had gone back. It was time. I turned and walked back toward Kim’s condo where my car was parked. Kim didn’t follow me. Which was just as well, because when I got there, I found the front windshield spray-painted black.

  Chapter 49

  I called Julie and she came and picked me up.

  “Who the hell would do such a thing?” she said.

  I told her about the nude picture.

  “It’s dirty tricks,” I said. “Maybe escalating a little. Joey Marino will come out and tow it. I assume they’ll have to replace the glass.”

  We were on Route 2 in Lincoln. It was dark. Julie had the headlights on. The rain/snow mix had turned to mostly snow as evening approached.

  “I’m scared for you, Sunny.”

  I nodded.

  “That would be the idea,” I said.

  “To make you scared?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you?”

  I was quiet for a little while. “Well,” I said, “already a guy came to my loft and threatened me.”

  “My God… threatened you how?”

  “ ‘Floating facedown and naked in the Charles River.’”

  “Sunny, my good Jesus.”

  “So I’m not sure paint on my windshield is so scary.”

  “You think it’s the same ones?”

  “Same three,” I said.

  “Three men?”

  “Yes.”

  We passed over Route 128. In one direction the white headlights gleamed through the light snowfall. In the other an endless and receding pattern of red taillights showed.

  “Is it Melanie Joan’s husband?”

  “And two friends,” I said.

  “Have you told the police?”

  “Brian Kelly has the picture,” I said. “He’s running it through the forensics lab.”

  “But about the rest of it.”

  “I know it,” I said. “But I need to prove it.”

  “Would you want to come and stay with me, you and Rosie?”

  “You’re sweet to offer, but I’ll stay where I am.”

  We were heading in the right direction, toward Boston. The traffic was heavier heading away from the city. Across Route 2 the lights were all on in the low brick building where Raytheon had its headquarters. It looked cozy. Lighted windows in the dark through the snow always look cozy. How cozy could it be in the Raytheon headquarters?

  “You never answered my question,” Julie said. “Are you scared?”

  “I try not to think about it,” I said.

  “But you are.”

  “Of course I am. Only an idiot would be unafraid. But I try not to think too much about being afraid. I’m better off acting as if I weren’t.”

  “Richie?” Julie said. “Spike? Your father?”

  “And Brian Kelly and maybe Lee Farrell, and maybe every old boyfriend I ever had.”

  I shook my head.

  “There’s nothing wrong with asking for help, Sunny.”

  “Ever the social worker,” I said.

  “Everybody needs help sometimes.”

  “Jule, we’ve had this conversation. In fact I’m having it with everyone these days. And to tell you the truth I’m a little sick of it.”

  “I’m sorry,” Julie said.

  “You know, and I know, that I can’t do what I have decided I want to do, and be the person I have decided I am, if every time I get scared I run to some man I know to bail me out.”

  We passed the big new Mormon Temple up on the right. The long legal wrangle had ended. The steeple was in place.

  “You don’t have to think of it as ‘bailing you out,’” Julie said after a little while.

  “However you wish to describe it,” I said, “I experience it as being bailed out and I don’t want that.”

  “Did you experience calling me to come get you as being ‘bailed out’?” Julie said.

  I started to say that’s different, and knew she would say different how? and I would say because you’re my friend and she would say isn’t Spike your friend, isn’t your father even more than a friend, and aren’t you and Richie friends? And I would be required to say that too was different, and she would ask how and I didn’t want to go there.

  I said, “I made an exception in your case.”

  Chapter 50

  I sat in my now-accustomed position beside the desk, facing Dr. Copeland, who had swung his chair toward me.

  “For a woman who’s not in therapy I spend a lot of time talking to psychiatrists,” I said.

  Copeland nodded.

  “What you said about patients telling Dr. Ex of my interest?”

  Copeland smiled faintly.

  “Well, I guess they did, because one of his friends came and threatened me to stop questioning one of his patients.”

  “Threatened you how?”

  “Implied physical threat.”

  “How did you react?”

  “I pointed a shotgun at him and told him to leave.”

  Copeland smiled again faintly.

  “It would seem to give weight to your suspicion of Dr. Ex.”

  “I think he’s molesting his patients,” I said.

  Copeland cocked his head.

  “My client, Melanie Joan, met him through therapy and later married him.”

  “Were they intimate while she was in therapy.”

  “Yes.”

  Copeland nodded.

  “Another current patient denies intimacy so vigorously,” I said, “and so unconvincingly.”

  “Tell me about her,” Copeland said.

  I’m a good observer
and a good reporter. I told him in detail.

  “Anything else?” Copeland said when I was finished.

  “Another current patient of his died of a drug overdose.”

  “Woman patient?”

  “They’re all women patients.”

  “Were the circumstances suspicious?”

  “It was a mediocre death in a small town,” I said. “Nobody paid a lot of attention. There was no autopsy. But she had come from Dr. Ex and was dead in bed when her boyfriend found her. He says she didn’t use drugs. There was no suicide note.”

  “Why was she seeing Dr. Ex?”

  “Her gyno sent her because she was depressed.”

  “Any cause for her depression?”

  “She was having trouble with her boyfriend.”

  “That’s a good cause,” Copeland said. “Did the police find any drugs in the house?”

  “Not that I know of. But I’m not sure anyone looked. No one paid much attention to this girl.”

  “Except Dr. Ex.”

  “And she’d have been better off without it.”

  Again Copeland did his little half nod, encouraging me to talk some more.

  “Tell me about date rape drugs,” I said.

  Copeland raised his eyebrows.

  “There are a number,” he said. “Versed, Rohypnol, GHB, Ketamine, something new called Burundang, which is a form of scopolamine. They all have the effect of pacifying the recipient so that she, or he, can offer little, if any physical resistance to sexual assault. Rohypnol is often called Roofies or Roach, GHB is sometimes known as Liquid Ecstasy or Cherry Meth, Ketamine is known among other things as Special K., I’m sure Versed has a half dozen street names as well, but I don’t know them.”

  “Could an overdose kill you?” I said.

  “Under the right circumstances,” Copeland said. “Do you think Dr. Ex administered such drugs to one or more of his patients?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Do you have any evidence?”

  “None that I could take to court,” I said.

  Copeland smiled. “Women’s intuition?” he said.

  I smiled back at him. “Something like that.”

  “Now, I’m afraid I’ll have to know Dr. Ex’s name.”

  I hesitated.

  “I may have knowledge that will help you,” he said. “And it may influence my own judgment of where to refer patients.”

  “Yes,” I said after a moment. “You do have to know. His name is John Melvin.”

  Copeland had no reaction.

  “Do you know him?” I said.

  Copeland made a little head movement that indicated only that he’d heard me speak.

  “Christ,” I said. “I could ask you what time it is and you’d avoid answering.”

  “You find that annoying?” Copeland said.

  “Oh Christ,” I said. “Must you always be a shrink?”

  “What would you like me to be?” Copeland said.

  “Human?”

  “You’re not here to see me because I’m human,” Copeland said. “When you came in you made a point of saying you weren’t in therapy.”

  “A little humor, Doctor.”

  Copeland didn’t say anything. I knew the technique. I had questioned enough suspects when I was a cop. Be still. Stay patient. And the suspect will find a way to say it.

  “One of the odd things in my time with Dr. Melvin,” I said, “was that we actually seem to be getting at things about me.”

  Copeland nodded.

  “I suppose he could be a good shrink,” I said.

  “Or he has a good patient,” Copeland said.

  “I’m not his patient,” I said. “And I’m not yours. I’m a detective on a case.”

  “What things are you getting at?” Copeland said.

  God, he was relentless. I took a long breath.

  “I seem to want to be with a man who is just like my father, but I don’t want to be with a man who is just like my father.”

  Copeland smiled.

  “My father took care of everything, my mother acted like she took care of everything. My father loved her unconditionally. If you asked my mother if she loved my father she would say ‘he’d do anything in the world for me.’”

  “And think she had answered the question,” Copeland said.

  “Yes.”

  “So you want a man who will take care of everything, and you want to be a woman who takes care of things herself.”

  “Yes.”

  “What has Dr. Melvin’s response been.”

  “He’s mostly interested in my sexual impulses.”

  If Copeland’s face ever showed anything it might almost have shown a moment of disapproval.

  “You find that inappropriate?” I said.

  “I’m interested in emotional conflict,” he said.

  I felt a small shock of recognition. I had never thought of myself as someone with emotional conflict. Copeland was quiet some more. Then I smiled at him.

  “Then have I got a girl for you,” I said.

  Chapter 51

  It was dark with a small cold rain misting down. Rosie was taking her late evening walk and I was along to hold the other end of the leash. We got to the Summer Street Bridge, and looked at the black water in Fort Point Channel, and turned and headed back toward my loft. The street was empty. Past Melcher Street Rosie stopped dead and put her ears up. There was a stir of dark movement in the recessed entry of one of the big silent rehabbed warehouses that line that end of Summer Street. I unbuttoned my raincoat. As I did so, Rosie barked once and three men in ski masks and dark clothing stepped out of the entry-way. I dropped Rosie’s leash. The three men grouped me toward the wall, and one of them grabbed me from behind and pinned my arms. Another one pressed his hand over my mouth and the third man faced me with something in his hand. There was some sort of white glove on the hand.

  In deference to the rain, I was wearing high-heeled black boots. I stamped a heel down on the toes of the man behind me, at the same time I bit the hand over my mouth. The hand went away. The man behind me grunted with pain and twisted to get his foot out of the way. It made him loosen his clamp on my arms a little and I was able to reach back with my left hand and grab a hard hold of his scrotum. I squeezed. He yelped and let go, trying to pull my hand loose. With my right hand, I fumbled under my raincoat. The man whose hand I had bitten hit me across the face with his fist. As I staggered I got my gun out from under my coat. I slammed it into his cheek, and put my back against the building and brought the gun up and pointed it at the third man, the one who had something in his hand.

  “Drop it, you sonovabitch,” I said.

  The man said “gun” in a high panicky voice, and dropped what he had in his hand. The man to my right managed to hit me on the side of the head and I pitched sideways, with things popping behind my eyes. I hung on to the gun and rolled over onto my back and, with both hands on the gun, fired at all of them and none of them and anything that was in front of the muzzle. In the still wet darkness, the shot thundered among the silent warehouses and along the empty street. A man said, “Jesus,” and the three of them ran for Melcher Street. I got to my feet with my balance still compromised and aimed at the running figures. Too far. They turned the corner at Melcher and I could hear their footsteps fading.

  I started after them and had to stop and lean against the brick wall. I got steady enough to turn and look around for the something the man had dropped. I found it, and got down on my knees in the shiny street, and picked it up. It was a hypodermic needle. It had broken. I picked up the pieces carefully and put them in my purse carefully, and still on my hands and knees with my head still unsettled, I looked around. Rosie. There was no sign of her. Jesus Christ. I got my feet under me and stood and staggered a little and got myself balanced again, and moved along Summer Street, with my gun in my hand, balancing with my right shoulder against the brick front walls of the buildings. I found Rosie in the entryway of our building,
her leash still trailing, humped up rather like a skunk in the fog, as my father used to say.

  “Maybe I should have bought an Akita,” I said to her.

  She wagged and I went to my knees and hugged her, the gun still held in my right hand, while she lapped my face.

  Chapter 52

  I sat on the edge of a desk in the Homicide squad room in the new police headquarters with a homicide detective I knew named Lee Farrell.

  “Lab says the stuff in the broken needle was a prescription drug called Xactil,” Lee said. “They use it to tranquilize people before surgery, and, sometimes, as a muscle relaxant.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That Xactil.”

  “Street name is Zack,” Lee said. “In moderate dosages it gives you a nice high. More will render the recipient unconscious and an even higher dose will kill him… or her.”

  “How high a dose was in the hypodermic needle.”

  “No way to tell.”

  I bumped my heels gently against the side of the desk.

  Lee said, “You know who they are?”

  “Yes.”

  “Shall we go get them?” Lee said.

  “I can’t prove it. They had on ski masks. Were there prints on the needle?”

  “Not enough surface intact,” Lee said.

  I bumped my heels some more.

  “You want to talk about this?” Lee said. “I’d rather not explain to your father how I let you get killed.”

  I smiled at the image.

  “Daddy would be hard to reason with, I guess.”

  “So?” Lee said.

  “I can’t, yet,” I said. “I know a lot, but I can’t prove any of it.”

  “Women’s intuition?” Lee said.

  I shook my head.

  “Maybe your husband’s family could be helpful,” he said.

  I shook my head again, my heels bumping gently against the desk.

  “Are you suggesting something illegal?” I said.

  Lee shrugged. “I don’t want to see you get hurt,” he said. “How about the big bear?”

  “Spike?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I am not ready to admit I can’t handle this,” I said. “If I’m going to do the work I want to do, I can’t be running to some man to help me every time it threatens to get rough.”

  “Sunny,” Lee said, “it has gotten rough. How about Phil?”